You can see the trailer here (fractalsoftworks.com).--------------------------------------

Hi guys. My first post here, I was referred by the good folks over at the LWJGL forums

I want to tell you about a (needless to say, Java) game I'm working on - Starfarer.

A little blurb to set the mood:

Quote

Two hundred years ago, the galaxy was ravaged by war. The story of Starfarer concerns a sector left largely untouched by the flames. Humanity has been slowly slipping into anarchy, and few outposts of civilization remain - it is a time of frequent conflict, rampant piracy, and shifting allegiances. A time of great profit for the few traders able to ply the old trading routes. A time of great danger and greater opportunity.

It's a single-player, sandbox-style sci-fi roleplaying game. You explore the different star systems, build up your character and your fleet, establish outposts or trade, and engage in lots and lots of fleet actions. It's been in development for about a year, and a beta version will be out in the coming months. Here's a link to our site, with lots more info about the game and a bunch of screenshots:

That's the Orion nebula, courtesy of NASA from this gallery - all public domain stuff! There was some fancy photoshop work involved to make it fit in with the rest of the game, the details of which I'm not familiar with The image is pretty big (2048x2048) so randomly offsetting it, especially at a lower resolution, gives some variety for free.

Also the particles/glow/bloom effects look great, how are you rendering them?

Most of the particle stuff is using glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE), with various textured-quad particles - so it's what you'd expect in that regard. One thing that works well almost across the board is a particle that's bright in the middle, and doesn't just use a super-smooth linear/quadratic transparency dropoff towards the edges. Like a small bright particle superimposed on a large dim particle. You get a more nuanced look with fewer quads. YMMV, though, since so much of it was just tweaking the relative sizes of things until it "looked right".

Not quite sure what you mean by glow/bloom... the ship engine glows? Those were actually pretty tricky to get, and ended up nothing like what I thought when I first approached them.

The "heated metal" look around the nozzles is just a particle at the base of the engine flame. The actual flame is where the real fun is. The base for it is a scrolling, tiling texture that looks kind of like a sine wave with a reflection around the X axis, really rather non-descript. That's rendered a bunch of times, going from short and wide to thin and narrow. There's yet another pass to render a flame-shaped dim outline that you can't even make out specifically, but that makes the overall flame look much smoother.

Ahhh, that. Thanks for the link - never knew the details, and that's a nice simple explaination. Seems like an awful lot of trouble if one is not already using shaders, though the results are impressive.

I wish. Tried that, using noise etc, and the end result was passable, but not in the same ballpark as the stuff created by the big bang

Here's what that looked like btw:

The above is just perlin noise for the blue bg, with the same noise matrix used to affect the probability of generating stars.

The nice thing was you can generate it on the fly, but pretty much have to use FBOs for performance, and that means putting in fallback pbuffer code when FBOs aren't available, and that was just a big pain. Could of course just generate and then save it, but then it's no longer dynamic... When I saw the NASA stuff, though, it was pretty clear I should just stop going down that path. Until that point, I thought the above looked kind of good

Looks and reads very nicely.And yes, it really does remind me of Master of Orion II and Galactic Civilizations II. Which is a GOOD thing!And if it runs on *nix systems, all the better (GCII does not really).I would LOVE to play it.

Well, we finally finished the trailer! You can see it here (fractalsoftworks.com).

Quote

And if it runs on *nix systems, all the better

It'll definitely run on Linux - I've been testing it out every so often on a Ubuntu box (one with an embedded graphics card, no less) and everything works just fine, thanks to LWJGL. The lack of a dedicated video card is... well, it's not nearly as bad as I expected

Awesome graphics. I love the realism of the beams, how the shields react with the environment and being pummeled, planets rotate and its atmosphere, hows damage can be dealt to different areas of the ships hull , gun rotation and recoil, and every single graphical detail that is in there, the particle effects on the explosions, projectiles and exhaust is super. The artwork on the sprites is awesome.

Awesome graphics. I love the realism of the beams, how the shields react with the environment and being pummeled, planets rotate and its atmosphere, hows damage can be dealt to different areas of the ships hull , gun rotation and recoil, and every single graphical detail that is in there, the particle effects on the explosions, projectiles and exhaust is super. The artwork on the sprites is awesome.

Hard work comes to mind

It is indeed bloody gorgeous. Seriously pretty. Awesome. Inspiring. This is what Master of Orion combat should have been...

java-gaming.org is not responsible for the content posted by its members, including references to external websites,
and other references that may or may not have a relation with our primarily
gaming and game production oriented community.
inquiries and complaints can be sent via email to the info‑account of the
company managing the website of java‑gaming.org